These photos of an oceanside cliffwalk in Chile make me swoon. What a lovely path, beautiful stonework. More photos here in the "recorrido" section.

The use of the hyphen is on the decline. Under-appreciated, I think.

How to write about Africa. [via waldo jaquith]

A photo collection of the Space Alphabet, a children's book from the 1960s. "M is for the moon, a dead, dead world." [via coudal]

These Wikipedia essays are tremendous. They're basically internal memos, where the philosophy and culture is hashed out in the same collective fashion as the primary content. A few that I really like:

• Arguments to avoid in deletion discussions
• Coatrack
• Humor
• Sarcasm is really helpful

Something I learned today: I was reading this NYT article about fashion, and I discovered that if you double-click a word in an NYT article, it will make a pop-up with a little dictionary/ reference search for you. Doesn't look like it works on the home page, but that's pretty cool. Am I the last person to learn about this?

The new book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes looks like it could be a good one. More at MSNBC.

The Museum of Reading has the entire Bayeux Tapestry online with explanatory notes. And on YouTube there's a pretty sweet semi-animated version that scrolls across the latter half of the 230-foot tapestry.

A slideshow essay on Slate asks, What's the point of public sculpture?

It hurts so much when you want a book to be fantastic, but it's not. Before I go there, I'll mention a couple saving graces for The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. There's a great quote from one of the main characters, architect Daniel Burnham: "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood." And there's a cool literary connection. The book takes place during the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The main grounds were known as the "White City" for the use of pale stucco on the buildings, and the first widespread use of streetlights. If you'll recall, there are a bunch of flashback narratives in Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth that also take place during the Chicago exposition. So it was cool to read Devil with some of the sense of wonder and awe and hardship in Chris Ware's comic.

I couldn't finish the book, though.

I hate it when authors don't trust the story or trust the audience to follow along without prodding. One example I'll never forget is in the film The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Evil armies are on the march, folks are going to take refuge in Helm's Deep. Gandalf has to run an errand, but he says to Aragorn, "Look to my coming, at first light, on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East."

And what do you know, a couple dozen scenes later, evil is at the door and prospects are bleak. But then Aragorn looks at a window with the morning sun shining in, and you get this ham-handed, idiotic Gandalf voiceover... "Look to my coming at first light on the fifth day. At dawn, look to the East." Uggghhh. Easily one of the worst parts of the whole trilogy. No trust in the audience to remember a great line, no subtlety.

In that vein, Devil author Erik Larson (no relation) does two things that drove me nuts. For one, he subdivides chapters into even smaller chunks. That doesn't normally bother so much, but his mini-sections get as small as a paragraph or two, or even a lone sentence. Too choppy. The second nuisance---and this is what killed me---is the frequent use of a teaser phrase at the ends of these mini-sections.

• Why anyone would even want a soundproof vault was a question that apparently did not occur to him.
• But even he did not, and could not, grasp what truly lay ahead.
• But again, that was later.
• It was one more sign of a gathering panic.
• Which terrified her.
• Hays grew suspicious and watched Mudgett closely---albeit not closely enough.

Come on. The book's jacket tells me there's a serial killer in there. Foreboding is already built-in, no need to pile it on.

Paul Festa made a film called Apparition of the Eternal Church, which looks really cool. Here's the trailer. It documents 10 people's reactions to hearing Oliver Messiaen's work for organ, Apparition of the Eternal Church. I hope it will come down to Atlanta for a showing. I definitely need to chase down a decent recording in the meantime.

Cartoonist Adrian Tomine, creator of Summer Blonde among other things, shares a New York City moment:

I went out to dinner with my wife at a sushi place in Brooklyn. Right as we were seated at our table, the couple at the adjacent table begins the following exchange:

WOMAN: So, did you read that book I gave you?

MAN: Which one?

WOMAN: The comic. Summer Blonde.

MAN: Oh, yeah. I hated it.

Evolution of a Hip, Ironic Catchphrase: "Don't tase me, bro!"

I heard about Everybody Hurts: An Essential Guide to Emo Culture in Believer Magazine a while back. It's funny at times, with some good illustrations. I enjoyed being able to point to parts of the emo taxonomy and say "I know someone like that... and that guy... and that one..." And for the emo consumer, there's a pretty good round-up of what you should be listening to, where you should buy your clothes, etc. The writing is really chatty, though, and I couldn't help but feel that they were stretching to make a target word count.

Michael Surtees has shared a short recap and a great collection of photos of Alphabet/City, a typographical tour of New York City led by Tobias Frere-Jones.

Street Mattress collects photos of abandoned mattresses.

Mozart once wrote a little party song titled Leck mick im Arsch. Here's the score. [via passionate geek]

One of the latest Art House projects is the Pen Pal Painting Exchange. Six bucks lets you swap a canvas with ten other people (brush buddies?).

Haile Gebrselassie set a new marathon record a couple days ago: 2:04:26. That's almost 13 miles an hour. Update: Just to put this in perspective, the world's best sprinters average about 23-24 miles an hour during their few seconds of exertion. Gebrselassie was going half as fast, but 400 times the distance, and 700 times the duration. It blows my mind.

Peter has written a lovely little piece about Radiohead's new album, In Rainbows. Everybody and their mom has touched on the overthrow of the big labels and the utopian arrival of direct-to-ear music subscription, but I thought this was really perceptive:

"They can independently master their disc and shuttle straight to their service provider, with no studio interns to smuggle a pre-master or studio reps to swipe a final copy.

Furthermore, fans get the music on Radiohead’s terms---not some nth generation digital-to-analog-to-digital transfer encoded to an MP3, but a direct-from-source version engineered to the band’s specifications.

It is, in a sense, the best possible leak."